Welcome to Coastal Voices!
Welcome to the second edition of the Coastal Voices e-newsletter. Our aim is to send this e-newsletter out every three months to keep the people who work and live on the North Island and Central Coast informed about local marine planning issues.
Marine Planning
Frustrated by the federal and provincial governments’ lack of effort in setting up a marine planning process for an 88,000 km2 area of ocean called the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA), in February, Living Oceans Society, David Suzuki Foundation and Sierra Club BC created an initiative known as “PNCIMA Watch” and launched a Countdown Campaign to Oceans Day.
A proper marine plan for PNCIMA will provide a forum to establish a network of protected areas while also maintaining access for important coastal industries so that our ocean’s health is sustained and the many coastal communities who depend on it are supported.
PNCIMA Watch identified commitments and milestones necessary to ensure the success of the planning process. The hope was that the Canadian and B.C. governments would achieve some, if not all, of the milestones by the Oceans Day deadline. Unfortunately, the governments did not reach a single milestone on the road to better ocean management!
Tired of government stalling, on the day after Oceans Day, 25 of North America’s leading scientists presented Prime Minister Harper with a declaration calling on him to start paying attention to our oceans, and PNCIMA specifically.
The good news is that there is still time to secure a bright future for B.C.’s incredible marine environment by building a marine plan that ensures a healthy future for our ocean.
To do this, we need YOUR help. Please join these scientists and CLICK HERE to sign the declaration.
The voices of the people who live and work in these areas are just as important as those of the scientists.
Download a copy of the declaration.
Fish Forever Blog
Coastal Voices has launched a blog! This will be a series of online discussions intended to raise awareness about our ocean ecosystems.
We are initially posting four questions and invite you to visit http://www.livingoceans.org/blog to comment as many times as you like.
Whether it is salmon, herring, halibut, or eulachon, the fish that live and travel through these waters are a critical part of our coastal ecosystem.
The blog is called "Fish Forever" because fish:
- provide food, jobs, and recreation for people
- are key to other animals’ survival and reproduction
- are an essential part of the nutrient cycle that feeds our forests
Local Ecological Knowledge
This is a regular feature contributed by Vern Sampson, our Local Ecological Knowledge Coordinator, about the work that he is doing interviewing people like you up and down the coast. Vern has spent over 30 years on the water and even though he’s now working out of an office instead of a boat, he still has his pulse firmly tuned to the workings of the coast. Here is Vern’s second report:
One of my recent tasks has been to go over LEK that was compiled by Living Oceans Society a few years ago, prior to my coming on board. From 2002–2005 Living Oceans Society conducted a Fisheries Use Analysis study. The study documented the relative values that 36 fishers in six different fisheries placed on the areas where they fished. The areas of interest ranged from upper Johnstone Strait to a line from Cape Sutil to Cape Caution, including mainland inlets and the Broughton Archipelago. In the summer of 2005, some analysis was done and six maps were produced that summarize all the data collected in these interviews. These maps clearly show the relative value that multiple fishers assigned to different fishing areas. The fisheries studied were: recreational salmon and groundfish as well as commercial salmon gillnet, commercial rockfish, commercial shrimp and commercial prawn.
I have contacted many of the participants from that study so that they can look at the summary maps and verify their accuracy before we post the maps on our website. We call this process ground truthing. The summary maps will be available on our website by the end of the year. By next week I should be finished the ground truthing process and getting back to my ongoing LEK interviews. I’m still looking for information and interviews from the Central Coast – “North of Caution.”
If you are interested in setting up an interview, or want some more information about Living Oceans Society’s local knowledge project, you can contact me at 250-973-6580 or vsampson@livingoceans.org.
Coastal Voice - Tim Motchman
“If I could choose one boat, it’d be a kayak.”
Tim Motchman has lived on the coast for 24 years. He read a book called “The Starship and the Canoe” by Kenneth Brower and was inspired to start kayaking and exploring the coast. His first paddle was from Sydney, B.C. to the head of Kingcome Inlet.
There he started to meet a lot of the people mentioned in the book and this combination of people and place drew him to stay. He started working as a kayak guide and met a man named Kayak Bill who taught him how to live off the land, which he did for two years, using only his kayak as his home. Kayak Bill also encouraged him with his carving and brought Tim to Sointula, where he is now settled and carves for a living. He has spent a lot of time on all sorts of boats from Campbell River to Cape Caution and as well as being a kayak guide, Tim has run crew boats for various coastal industries and fished commercially.
For Tim, carving is a way to express his love of the water and a way to live off the land without impacting it. He uses his art as a way to show his appreciation of the coast and all of the creatures that depend on it. He gets his wood from various sources, but it is always the pieces that most people would see as scrap or waste.
Coastal Voices caught up with him on a rainy summer day at home with his daughter Elena.
CV: Do you have a special place?
Tim: I have many. My favourite places are the outer islands of the Broughton Archipelago, Nimmo Bay, Cape Caution and Bradley Lagoon in Blunden Harbour.
CV: Why do we need to plan for the ocean?
Tim: Everything in the ocean is interconnected. Whether you use the ocean recreationally on the weekends or commercially day to day, you affect it.
CV: If there was a planning process for this region, how would you want to be involved?
Tim: I would want to make sure that the theme of interconnectedness is heard. I would also want to be informed about the process to be able to pass on information to others.
CV: If there was one place that you would like to see conserved for future generations, where would it be and why?
Tim: There can’t just be one place because it is all connected. We need to work to preserve the whole coast because it is an integrated system. And by the whole coast, I mean everything: the people, the places, the industries, the creatures.
If you know someone who works and lives on the coast that you think should be our next Coastal Voice, send an email to lrenehan@livingoceans.org
This year is Living Oceans Society’s 10th birthday and we want to celebrate by singing about the ocean. But we need your help with lyrics that we’ll set to music.
The ocean song will be based on the “complaints choir” idea that started in Finland and has caught on all over the world. Our song won’t just be complaints though. We want to know what comes to mind when you think of the ocean. Words like flashers, kelp island, sea smoke, booby; place names like Metlakatla, Blow Hole, Insect Island; or whole sentences like “you forgot to lock the pig” or “sea lice suck” or “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
We’ll take your contributions, weave them together and set them to the melody we are writing, and then practice like crazy. We’ll perform the song at our 10th anniversary bash. And we might even post it to our website.
Fill in some lyrics below.
This summer:
Look for us at OrcaFest in Port McNeill on August 16th.
For more information about what is happening on the North Island and Central Coast, visit www.coastalvoices.ca
